


Twenty-One Minutes

by Lynzee005



Category: McLennon - Fandom, The Beatles (Band)
Genre: First Meeting, Gen, McLennon, Meet-Cute, Mutual Pining, St. Peter's Garden Fete
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 10:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20172685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005
Summary: On a bustling Saturday afternoon, during a week-long heatwave, in the cool quiet of a church hall, with guitars and charged air between them and not much else... two boys laid eyes on each other for the first time...





	Twenty-One Minutes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blobfish_miffy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blobfish_miffy/gifts).

> For blobfish_miffy, based on the prompt: "...their first meeting, at the fête [...] with like the tiniest amount of painful pining."
> 
> Image credit: _The Introduction_ by Eric Cash, which apparently hangs in the church hall where the meeting took place!
> 
> Source material for times and weather patterns: _The Day John Met Paul: An Hour-By-Hour Account of How the Beatles Began_ by Jim O'Donnell (_a must read!!!_)

_It’s 3 am, and the angels over northern England are playing billiards in the constellations. Laughter trails like comet dust as their celestial cue ball ping pongs off Cassiopeia’s upside-down throne, the tail end of Ursa Major, Hercules’ club in his outstretched hand. Between Aquila and Cygnus playing keepaway from Delphinus and getting caught in the swirling eddies of the Spindle Galaxy and Cat’s Eye Nebula, the active orb has a hard time finding its true mark, the place where it’s meant to land. _

_ In the pre-dawn humidity all light is crystalline, refracted by the saturated air and shot out over the drowsy streets below like birthday cake sparklers. Lamplight sparkles on the dusky waterway that edges the city. Glow from the odd car headlamp bounces erratically along the carriageways that make up the angular geometry of this city, three-quarters of a millennia old now. Old enough to be talked about in dusty tomes on university library shelves. _

_ But not _ _ too _ _ old. No city containing these new-fangled“teenagers” can ever truly be old. _

_ Tonight the angels are playing, but the game has never been more high-stakes. Their silly game has gone on too long, but by 3:33 am, things are settling; a final shot is lined up, and light fires across the sky to land in Lyra, colliding with Vega, that once-and-future North Star, to send shimmering light from the heavens into the treetops of this tiny corner of this ancient city, fifty-three degrees north and just this-side of the Prime Meridian. _

_ There, in two houses separated by a mile of kelly green golf lawns and foliage in the full bloom of summer, two teenaged boys—there’s that term again, "teenager", never before used to describe that peculiar age—drowse beneath the unseen astral glow. Safe in their beds, in their rooms, in the homes of the adults whose sheltering arms bound the world in which they live, they’ve gone to sleep in excitement for a monumentally big day ahead; they just don’t know it yet. _

_ The angels watch with bated breath as their divine detritus drifts downward. Straight downward. If it continues on its trajectory, it'll miss its mark, stardust landing on leaves and eaves and window sills, maybe, if they're lucky. But without a helping hand, another gentle push to get it to land where it needs to, all the angels in the world won't be able to turn it around and make this happen. _

_ But, as Ladies Luck and Fortune_—they have always worked hand in hand_—__would have it, a breeze has begun to stir. Just in the nick of time. _

_ It starts at the water’s edge and flits over Cressington and Grassendale on its way inland, brushes the fine drapery of the room in Allerton where the boy with black hair lays dreaming of girls and guitars; his window, left open to cool down a room rendered too hot by the slumbering cat of a daytime heatwave sitting over his city for the last however-long, welcomes the passively cool air but without this breeze, the temperature differential itself would have barely stirred the wilting curtains, pushed aside and hanging heavy, lace columns framing the open shutter. He feels the current on his toes, and smiles in his sleep. _

_ It travels, this breeze, down Forthlin Road, across the golf course, skirting under Calderstones, looking both ways before crossing Menlove Avenue in the village of Woolton and into the bedroom of another sleepy young man. A cross-draft pushes his curtains a little harder, rustles a feathery wisp of auburn hair that falls across his forehead. He turns over in his sleep, murmuring nothings through partially-open lips into the dewy air around him. _

_ The breeze smiles the entire way as pieces of that shattered starlight, noiseless in the zephyrs that swirl where warm air meets cool, drift through these open bedroom windows. They land on the strings of guitars, so much like the strings of the lyre from which they fell. They land on calloused fingers. They land on the lashes and in the brushed-out Brylcreemed hair of the boys tucked in their beds. _

_ High above the city, the angels carouse. They have done their job, and it’s goodnight and good luck as they depart for several pastures, other tasks, setting different wheels in motion in other cities around the world. They have to, you see. In the east, the sun is rising. _

_ The day is about to begin. _

* * *

6:47pm

Ivan Vaughan is pleased as punch and it shows, on his face and the bouncing way he crosses Church Road. His white dress shirt is coming untucked, damp with sweat along the middle of his back and under his arms, and his quiff droops across his forehead, unable to withstand the heat of the early July day. He looks up at the sky, a low grey ceiling closing down overhead, and he just _ knows _that it’s going to rain. Any minute now. He doesn't care. His lazy hand brushes up through the front of his hair, pushing it up and out of his eyes.

“This way, la’,” he chirps to the guy behind him, the one with his hands in his pockets, guitar strapped to his back, half-way through a King Brothers song in his white sport coat. (“_ Fresh outta pink carnations? _” Ivan had asked earlier, just to make the point clear.)

“Are you sure?” 

There’s a note of hesitation in the other bloke’s voice, but Ivan waves a hand in front of him, as if that’s meant to reassure him. It doesn’t work. The other boy quickens his pace, shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, feels a cool wave of adrenaline and sweat course from the top of his head to the soles of his shoes. They two-step across the small courtyard, him and Ivan, his mate and birthday twin, the one who’s going to get him an introduction to the little skiffle group that he just _ has a feeling _about. 

He watched them perform, after all, these tough-looking kids not much older than him playing shuffling rockabilly and country-tinged radio hits. He'd been mesmerized, by the way they looked, so cool and having so much fun. He’d never seen them before today, but there they were, and here he is, and it's been weirdly electric, the way he's felt all day. He’s excited. He’s nervous. He’s pretty sure he’s overdressed.

He’s Paul, and he’s standing on the threshold of St. Peter’s Church Hall with his stomach in his throat and leaden fingers threading through his belt loops. 

“Relax, Paul,” Ivan says. “They don’t bite. Well—most of them, anyway.” 

Ivan reaches the side door and leads them through the kitchen and into the main hall. Paul ducks his head a little, even though he passes well clear of the lintel above the door; he feels too big for the space, too big suddenly for his own body, and he can’t quite figure out why. The kitchen hums as church ladies prep for the dance, the faint clatter of carts and the rustling, faraway footfalls a soft din that backgrounds the experience of walking through the antiseptic kitchen and onto the dark, polished wood floor of St. Peter’s Church Hall. 

The slickness at the nape of his neck shocks against the cool air as he and Ivan interrupt the circle of boys in front of the stage. Paul shivers as he peers around Ivan’s shoulders, sizing up the others. 

But his eyes are really only on one of them...

* * *

6:49 pm

At the center of a circle of folding chairs, sleeves rolled up, guitar idling in his lap, the auburn-haired boy watches through narrow eyes as the two newcomers enter the circle. Without his glasses he can’t see a thing but he can tell from the way he walks that one of the lads is Ivan; the other must be the bloke Ivan’s been raving about. The one he absolutely _ has _to meet.

He leans back in his chair, just a little. The one he’s sure is Ivan speaks.

“Everyone, this is Paul. Paul, this is… well, everyone,” Ivan says, before rattling off the list of names of each boy in the room—Pete and Eric and Colin and Len and Rod—and then Ivan got to him, and the boy lifts his chin a bit, peering down his nose and across the room. 

“And that’s John,” Ivan says. “The Quarrymen.”

“Pleased to meet you,” The Boy Called Paul says, and a murmur of greeting goes around the circle as Ivan pulls up two more chairs and he and Paul sit down. The others engage in polite conversation, discussing birds they saw in the crowd or their set list for that evening. John, however, is quiet. He can make out the general shape of the new guy. Seems a bit small, but Ivan told him he was only fifteen, so at least that checks out. 

_ And he brought his guitar with him _ , John thinks as his piss-poor eyes fall on the body of the guitar that this Paul fellow has propped up beside him. _ Intriguing. Presumptuous, but intriguing. _

The lads talk, and John watches, squinting to get a clearer view. All he can really make out at the broad strokes, the big gestures. The younger boy follows the conversation as it zips around the circle. He laughs when others laugh, even if it’s an inside joke that he’s sure to miss. John can’t tell if he likes that or not; he’s wary. Maybe the kid is just a good conversationalist; maybe he’s a kiss-ass. He tries not to stare at Paul, and he wishes he’d brought his glasses—a rare thing for John to want. But he wants to see this kid, tough-guy image be damned, and his faulty eyesight is preventing that. 

In the meantime, he settles for what his other senses can tell him. 

When he sat down, John thought he could smell cologne, or aftershave, or _ something _ and he knows it’s not Ivan’s, so it must be Paul’s; it takes him a moment to realize that it’s floral, probably from something his mum put in his laundry or something. It’s not strong, whatever it is, not distracting, and it smells better than body odour so John supposes that’s one better than a lot of the guys he hangs around already, and he gives Paul the point. And the kid’s got a soft enough voice, not too deep, and probably has a nice singing voice too if he can carry a tune. Of course he’s only heard him say four words—“ _ Pleased to meet you _”—so that’s a shot in the dark assumption. Still, the kid does laugh, and it’s a pleasing sound. John wonders what it might take to make him laugh; he's suddenly overcome with the desire to try. 

John has no idea why he’s giving this perfect stranger the benefit of the doubt. He’s been sitting there for two minutes, tops, and he _is_ only fifteen.

But then so is Ivan, and _ he’s _ alright. 

He just wishes he could _ see _the fucking kid.

So he squints a little more and, even though he doesn’t understand the physiology of it, his vision sharpens a little bit more, and Paul comes into focus.

The white sport coat makes John smile. _ Dressed to impress? _ he thinks. But it _ is _impressive, somehow, and it takes John a few moments to figure out why—dark hair, DA quiff, pale skin, turned-down eyes. 

_ He looks like fuckin’ Elvis Presley… _

John gulps a little. In his mind’s eye, he envisions a stage, him at one mic and Paul—this white-sport-coat-wearing, quiffed-up, sad-eyed little Elvis—at the other, in front of the rest of the band and their tea chests and their washboards and Colin’s little drum kit, but then he erases it all and plugs in their guitars instead and strings up stage lights and puts a couple hundred screaming fans at the front of the stage, and he suddenly hopes that the kid can sing because the look would be _ amazing _… 

But it’s more than that, isn’t it?

John leans forward a bit, eyes narrow slits in his thin face, as Paul takes control of the sudden lull in conversation, picks up his guitar, and swings it over his shoulder. 

* * *

6:50pm

Paul’s tongue is thick in his mouth as he adjusts the body of his Zenith Model 17 acoustic across his middle. He wraps his right hand around the frets and feels his way to a chord, strums softly to check that it’s in tune and is pleased to hear that the heat of the summer afternoon and all the jostling of the fête hasn’t warped the sound too badly. Still, he finagles the D string, the G string, relative tuning to the pure notes they ought to be, and strums again, a little louder, with a little more confidence. 

“Yer gonna play that backwards?” the boy named John asks.

Paul flicks his eyes up, just for a moment, before finding his way on the frets. With his eyes closed, he starts to play, and the hall goes quiet except for the notes ringing out from the hollow body of his guitar.

“_Well I’ve got a gal with a record machine…_”

The song is already a pretty short one, and Paul plays through it anxiously fast, so it’s a little less than a minute and a half later that the final note rings out and the lads gathered around him mutter their approval. Ivan, especially, beams like a proud father as he casts his eyes over at John. And that’s where Paul looks too, because the only approval he wants is from the boy in the checked shirt and black drainies, with wavy hair and the look of a Ted, the one who fronts a skiffle band that ought to be playing rock and roll.

Paul feels bold. He barely stops before picking up the pace again, launching into a Gene Vincent number he’s only just figured out how to play. Confident, he swivels his hips in time with the music, hoping that he doesn’t look foolish. He doesn’t quite know what “Be-Bop-A-Lula” means but he can _ feel _that it means something important, so he hopes that comes across in the way he strums and the stance he adopts, the way he moves his body as he channels Gene Vincent, and then, almost as quickly, becomes Little Richard, barreling ahead into a medley.

He can’t stop. Not that he wants to, of course. But even if he did, he couldn’t. He’s a freight train, and the strings of his guitar are the tracks, and he’s racing up and down at breakneck speed, gyrating, bobbing, swaying like his idols, the ones he’s watched on the cinema screens. Paul is desperate not just to embody the rock and roll that courses through his veins but to make such an impression that these older boys, Ivan’s friends, are suitably impressed enough to offer him a slot in their expansive lineup. What’s one more guitar, eh?

It’s only when the medley of Little Richard songs nears its conclusion that John stands up, crosses the circle, and Paul notices the squint in his eyes and wonders—briefly—if the boy is angry, if he’s pushed his luck, gone too far, and is about to get decked. But all John does is take a better, closer look at the chords Paul is holding as his lightning fast right hand dances up and down the frets. John rubs the bridge of his nose. Paul feels the cool drip of sweat run down the back of his neck and beneath the collar of his sport coat. 

John smells like beer, and Paul is thirsty. He’s glad the song is almost over; the final chord rings out, and he swallows, his still thick, dry tongue heavy in his mouth. 

Ivan claps, because Ivan’s always been a mate and he orchestrated this whole thing after all, so why not? The others join in, and Paul thinks: _ Suitably impressed _.

But it’s John he wants a reaction from. And the one he gets isn’t the one he expects.

“You know all the words.”

Paul nods.

There’s a pause. “And what’re these chords yer playin’?” John asks.

Paul swallows again. “They’re… guitar chords,” he replies, thinking it a dumb question for only a moment until he remembers that he watched John onstage earlier playing banjo chords. He smiles a bit. “You’re playin’ banjo chords.”

John bristles a bit. “What of it?”

There’s an aggression there that Paul doesn’t appreciate but he knows he provoked it, so he walks himself back. “Well, I could show you…” Paul begins, his voice a curious mix between meek and assertive as he stands up to his full height—they’re the same height, he and John; he notices that right away—and holds John’s gaze...

His breath catches in his throat. Squinting brown eyes size him up. Paul straightens his shoulders, squares them to John’s. He pumps himself full of cocksure bravado to hide the ardent admiration he feels, which he’s sure is painted all over the shallow breaths sucked into his lungs and the flush in his cheeks. Because here’s a guy who’s doing what Paul wants to be doing, and he can’t _ help _but feel amazed in his presence. 

Paul can’t square the feeling that he’s on a first date and is trying not to appear too eager. That’s not how two blokes go about it. And anyway this is just a casual meeting. Playing guitar. Nothing to it, nothing special.

Then why can’t Paul stop looking at John’s mouth? 

He shakes his head a little, banishes the thought, buries it, swallows it down to sit alongside his missed-supper hunger pangs.

If John can tell that he’s falling, he doesn’t show it. Instead he peers down his nose at him again, clears his throat. 

“Show me what?”

* * *

6:57pm

Paul pulls out a notepad—John can’t see from where—and begins to scribble lyrics into the lined paper. But scribble isn’t the right word for it, and even in John’s slightly inebriated, very blind state, he can see that the younger boy has..._ admirable _ penmanship. Teacherly, almost. John cranes his neck and watches the boy’s pen flow across the page, skipping a line each time in order to write in the guitar chord progression above the lyrics. He talks a mile-a-minute, too, explaining what he means, singing snippets of the song to make sure he’s gotten it right, muttering to himself and hesitating when he doesn’t. 

“_ I'll climb one, two flight, three flight, four _,” Paul half-sings, catching himself with a little laugh. “It’s about sex, you know.”

John snorts a little, and his breath brushes some un-coiffed hair curling in the humidity beside Paul’s ear. _ What does he possibly know about it? _ he wonders, but not too hard, because he’s only fifteen and he’s a bloke ferchrissakes, but that’s where his mind _ wants _ to go, and so he stops it. “They’re _all_ about sex,” he says instead.

Paul’s pen slows down, still. He nods. “Right,” he agrees, his voice softened, all rounded angles and light touches as it helixes from his lips. “Yeah, I suppose.”

John is joined by Eric, who stands at Paul’s other shoulder and watches with the same keen-eyed fascination at the young upstart, the one with real chords in his fingertips and the swivel of a King in his hips. They’re both rapt. But John, bent low over Paul’s shoulder so he can see, is breathing in the scent off Paul’s collar—warm, lavender, sweat, _ intoxicating _—and he rearranges his ego and more besides as he bends a little lower, a little closer.

“That it then?” John asks as Paul’s pen stops at the end of the page.

“Well,” he says, turning his face a little to find himself nearly cheek to cheek with John. “You need to re-tune your guitar.”

“How do I—?”

But Paul is already getting up and retrieving John’s guitar—the red-and-black Gallotone Champion his mum had taught him to play—and showing them how to tune it properly. John’s missed the beginning of the lesson, though, because he’s too busy imagining how this day has turned out, where this kid came from, how it’s possible they haven’t met before, why he feels so strangely and provocatively enamoured of the lad after only about fifteen minutes…

The vision he’d had before comes back, and now instead of just seeing them on stage he hears them too. He hears Buddy Holly songs, sung in harmony, because he’s just sure that his voice would sound pretty darn good alongside Paul’s. And other songs too—the songs that Paul has already sung, certainly, would be show-stoppers, and maybe he knows more, could write out the lyrics and chords to _ those _ , or maybe they could learn a few new ones together, _ real rock n’ roll songs _. 

John’s feels alive and inspired like he hasn’t felt in forever, and he can’t believe it’s because of _ some kid _ . Some kid with dark hair and hazel eyes—at least he thinks they’re hazel—and delicate hands that coax the most amazing sounds from his instrument, to the point where John can’t tell what he’s more jealous of: Paul’s talent or Paul’s guitar. And _ that _confuses John mightily. 

He hopes none of this—his admiration, his consternation—shows on his face as Paul finishes tuning John’s guitar and leans back in his chair, and John realizes that he’s absorbed exactly none of what Paul has been teaching but also that Paul hasn’t looked up once and so he hasn’t seen John’s face. But in that moment they do see each other, as Paul hands John his guitar back.

“You sticking around for the dance?” John asks, hating how breathless he sounds.

Paul shrugs. “Actually I need to get home,” he says, standing up and reaching for his own guitar again. “It’s me dad’s birthday tomorrow. Have to finish arrangements.”

He swings his guitar onto his back again, shoves his hands back into his pockets.

“This was fun,” he says. “Maybe we can do it again sometime?”

John nods. He’d like that; he’d like that more than he cares to admit. 

The others say their goodbyes, and Ivan joins Paul on the outer edge of the circle of chairs as they make their exit. John watches Paul’s back, focuses on the smudge of white as it recedes from view out the main door.

“Well _ that _ was something,” Eric says.

John nods. It’s all he can do. 

Pete clears his throat, announces the time—just about ten-past-seven, which means they’ve got less than an hour before the dance starts—and John absently thinks about eating. But so much has changed, like the world has shifted on its axis and nothing is quite where it should be anymore, that hunger is the last thing on his mind. 

He thinks he hears the sound of thunder outside. Liverpool hardly ever sees thunderstorms. He looks back at the door, through which the teenage dream had so recently sauntered. 

Today seems to be one for surprises...

* * *

_ Night falls and brings with it a great relief of rain as the heat of the day finally breaks. A rare thunderstorm is surely wreaking havoc with the nerves of the ladies relaxing into cups of tea after another successful fête, who would rather not stew in their nightclothes but wish the rain didn’t have to bring with it such calamity. Their husbands puff pipes and listen to the radio, reading the evening papers. Their children, if they have any, play indoors to avoid getting soaked and catching colds which would mean keeping them indoors for much, much longer, and with summer already well-established, that would be a cruelty no one wants. _

_ Dark-haired Paul, with his guitar strapped to his back, hurries down the lanes and motorways of his little corner of Liverpool on the way home from the fête, trying to stay ahead of the rain. Ivan goes with him, but only part-way. They talk about the meeting. Paul doesn’t have to think too hard to decide that he likes that Lennon fellow, although he doesn’t tell Ivan that it’s not just John’s cluelessness about the guitar, or the swagger on stage that was obviously a self-conscious attempt to cover for it. It’s not even about the way he looks—although, no, obviously it’s the way he looks, tight jeans and narrow shoes and hair Paul wants to run his fingers through… _

_ But that’s daft, and a bit iffy, and that’s not something Paul has the ability to figure out right now so he doesn’t even try. Instead, Paul sees a future suddenly where he and John Lennon play rock and roll over the tops of their guitars at each other. Where they harmonize together over the melodies they love, or even better, where they write their own songs to sing. _

_ Ivan asks The Question before they part—“If he asks, you wanna join the band?”—and Paul plays it cool, because he’s fifteen, but later that night, as he lays in bed with a decidedly cooler breeze flowing through his open window, he smiles inwardly because he knows John will ask him, and he knows he’ll say yes. _

_ Hours later and on the other side of the green space that separates their houses, John walks home with Pete and the conversation turns toward the upstart kid who crashed their rehearsal. “Should we let him in?” is what Pete wants to know, and it’s the question on John’s mind too, although the answer he’s grasping for isn’t the obvious one. Because here’s this guitarist who is miles and away better than anyone else in the band, John included, and John knows this; he could very easily upstage them all. But without him, John wonders if they’ll ever play anything bigger than the St. Peter’s Church Garden Fête. _

_ He’s got to ask him. And it feels like he’s decided to pop the question. Like this is a marriage proposal and not just an invitation to join a skiffle band. He’s nervous; his palms are sweaty as he nods to Pete and tells him,“Well we have to let him in, don’t we?” _

_ And that’s that. _

_ Yes, night falls with that great relief of rain but above the clouds that are starting to part, the angels, too, are satisfied that they’ve hit their mark. Destiny has been cruise-control driven to the first stop on a long and winding road. Oh, they’d have found each other eventually, someday; in a town as old as Liverpool and two rockers as teenaged as them, it’s a vanishingly small probability that they’d have never met. The angels have just coaxed them along, scattered their stardust over sleeping eyes like Shakespeare’s Puck and gently guided them to the conclusion that was always written in the constellations they've been navigating since birth. _

_ All it took were two guitars and twenty-one minutes. _


End file.
